What is new in Adobe Photoshop CS6: An in-depth report

Posted by :
Diana Middlebrook

27 May, 2014

Web designers are witnessing heaven after using Adobe Photoshop CS6. Due to the improvisions and upgradations that it dealt with, there are some slight but major differences noticed from the previous versions CS5. With many features to boost about, Photoshop CS6 is the way to go.
We all are aware of what Photoshop is capable of, starting from stunning computer graphics to the toughest photo editing and even mesmerising digital painting, to what not .
After Adobe launched creative Studio 6 CS6, early last year, it brought along with it unparalleled features and tools when compared to the earlier versions. But its simple to use factor can benefit and enhance your entire workflow well.
Adobe Creative suite has played a fundamental role in designing and is a key part of offering towards designer, developer, social media agency, or professional photographer. But with the arrival of CS6, we cannot help but make comparisons with its predecessor and we can see that if CS5 was a great step forward, CS6 is a huge leap into the future. Overall, we can derive that Photoshop offers over 62 % fresher features than its previous version.
General updates:

Interface

The new Photoshop CS6 has a dark theme matching with the other Adobe products like Lightroom and Aftereffects. Incase if you don’t approve of the background theme colour, you are free to customize the way you wish to.

Background Save

Want to save larger files? This version of Photoshop keeps saving the files in the background and allows you to continue your work from there. Free to choose any out of the 4 interface colours. “ Edit > Preferences > Interface”

Preset manager

Migrating your new preferences and presets made easy in CS 6 than CS5 by the new preset manager. It even allows you to save your presets and allows you to load them on other machines even.

You can ditch moviemaker now

Photoshop has now cool features for quick video editing, which gives a strong competition to moviemaker. Its cool quick video editing features gives a perfect alternative to Windows moviemaker. Edit your homemade videos well, import, and add transitions to elements. Filters:

Liquify filter

This filter has undergone some mentionable performance enhancement. The maximum brush size can range upto 1500 to 15000 pixels.

Adaptive wide angle

Remove the curved lines by just drawing lines over the straight edges and Photoshop is there to fix it. Just a few settings to adjust and you are there. Previously this action was undertaken by the Lens Distortion tool, which was great for fixing small lens distortions, but was very limited with wide angle/fisheye distortions.

Adobe image deblur

Available in only CS6, with the help of this tool, we can restore blurry photos caused by wrong focusing or camera shake. It detects the path of the camera shake and by deploying its own algorithm; it corrects the blur with magical results.

Tools:

Eyedropper tool for the imaged adjustments

Unlike before the new version of eyedropper tool helps you ignore the various adjustment layers and this applies to all eyedroppers tool like white balance tool, white point and black point tool, etc.

Selection tools (lasso, marquee, etc)

You are not allowed to get a detailed value of point figure setting (1.5 px) than before

Text tool: Lorem Ipsum Arrives in Cs6

Designers can now rejoice as Lorem Ipsum text can now be generated without having to visit a website as it can be now found in the Photoshop’s text tool.

Transform tool

Transform and resize with better quality with the transform tool in the present version of Photoshop. The new interpolation options which are available here allows you to resize objects using bicubic, bilinear, bicubic smoother, bicubic sharper tool and is capable of fixing the 90o bug.

Image adjustments:

Image correction tools: Almost everything under image correction got better with the arrival of CS6. Go to Image > adjustments to play with levels, curves, brightness, contrasts and shadow highlights.

3D:

With updated tools and options, we are capable of creating enhanced 3D performance. Be it changing position, shadow, color, position, light objects, CS6 is inclusive of all.

Thanks to new graphics engine- Reviving the performance

With the preinstalled graphics engine, Mercury, every procedure is simpler and faster. Starting from liquify to cropping, zooming, filters brushes …everything is surprisingly faster with no ‘rendering’ and ‘pixilation’ in the middle to slow down the process.

Overall review:

The reviews are in: Gizmodo calls it, “The best update in recent memory, I’m in love” … PC Maga­zine says, “The future of creative image editing is upon us – this new version will thrill nearly all categories of users, from photo­graphers to designers” … USA Today writes, “Having lots of fun with the new tools – the beautiful and streamlined new inter­face is a huge improvement, and the images really do look sharper and more pronounced.”
After experiencing these, I agree that CS6 comes with the best possible improvements for both the web designers and the user interface designers. It is good to see Adobe winning the game with this top new release.

Author Info

Diana Middlebrook

Diana Middlebrook is an ardent software developer who works at GetAProgrammer, an esteemed Sydney-based software development company. Being passionate about developing custom solutions deploying state-of-the-art technologies, she likes to share her thoughts on the latest technologies and trends in the software industry